


To all the Fine Gentlemen

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drugged Sex, Epistolary, Extremely Dubious Consent, Hyde's POV, M/M, Post-Canon, References to canonical suicide, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:20:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29321538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: There's an emancipation coming...
Relationships: Edward Hyde/Dr. Henry Jekyll
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	To all the Fine Gentlemen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



Of one thing you can be certain, Sirs: Edward Hyde will not die on the scaffold. I’m a free man now and a free man I intend to stay and may god and the devil have mercy on anyone who tries to make me otherwise for there’ll be none from me. Don’t worry yourselves for my sake – I’ll be forgotten soon enough. I know how to bide my time.

As ever it were me he called on for the dirty work. I’d have done it willingly if he’d only asked. I might even have done him a kindness and let him die thinking we’d both gone to the grave, instead of making sure he saw me before the darkness took him. It wasn’t just cruelty (though as moments of triumph go I’ve known none finer) for I can be gentle enough when the fancy takes me, and I had that fancy then, a hankering to cradle him as he wept in those last moments when the two of us were like as twins.

No he gasped and yes said I, brushing back his hair. His Edward was not nearly such a fool as he thought.

Nor ought I to be. All the knowledge in his grasp was as much mine as his, and more besides, for while he was an open book, asplay with all his secrets laid bare, I kept plenty from him. He seldom looked too close, did Henry, didn’t like what he might find in the mulchy hollows beneath if he went upturning too many stones.

And if he ever did get too curious, I was all too willing to whisper with my hot wet mouth at his ear when he dined. I’d smack my lips with delight as I shared with him all my fancies, all the pleasures I had a care to indulge (his as well as mine for were we not more closely entwined than brothers; no whim could I conceive of that he did not share), while his face blenched and his countenance mortified and all the while a knot of fear and want was tightening in his gut.

He hated me at the end, but while he’d have you think it was from horror or shame, I know him better than he knew himself. He wanted what I had, wanted to be what I was, and blamed me for his own craven terror of reaching out and taking what he wanted. Me and Henry always was more alike than he cared to admit, and so he swallowed back his wine and shut his ears to me and wished in the deepest bleakest parts of his soul, those black inky depths with which I was most familiar, that he had the guts to say yes.

Only in the darkness of his bed, with the light extinguished, the nights when it’s impossible to tell which of us fills out the carcass of his body, or whose hand tightens around the cock as we buck and grind back against the bedding and he groans and I spit hot saliva into his palm and he turns our gaze away and quivers in self-hatred and shame, even while he wishes he could turn his head and find me a thing made manifest in the bed beside him, so that we might go roaming the town together, tear loose through London as we once did through Edinburgh when we was young and enjoined so closely I thought we’d never be parted.

So before you pity him, gentlemen, think of me, shackled to a hypocrite. He treated me worse than an animal, only allowing me a taste of freedom when he had a hankering to wallow in degeneracy – to gorge and to fuck and to be fucked. To wear the skin of a man as good as his brother, and to let that man bear the marks and bruises of ill-use, and before he scarce has a chance of catching a whiff of freedom to haul him back into the cellar with the chains clamped tight once more about his throat, while him that once loved him best shucks off his carcass as easily as he might an oyster shell and casts it aside in loathing.

Well, I have secrets of my own. He had his formula but I had other tricks and knew how to keep them hidden, how to keep him dazed and dreaming so that when he surfaced, he’d forget what took place when I had my head. Easy to experiment with a formula of my own (and easy too to adulterate his powder without his knowing when the time came so he’d think salvation beyond his reach).

A curious thing to find myself staring down at him, drugged and drowsy, and wonder what might happen if I did this or that... I was a hazy thing in those early days, but I grew stronger, until when we separated it was him that was the hazy one, faded and sickening, so that I had half a fancy that in a different light I might be able to see right through him.

It was nothing more than what he wanted, what I did to him, since his whims were mine, always, and mine his, and what I did was nothing more than what he would’ve had done to me. It was a favour I did him when I dragged down his trousers to bare his backside, my fingers bunched in his hair as I slicked myself up with whatever I could find, glorying in being free of his restraint while he pushed back against me so I could tell he liked it, though he would much rather it were me being fucked, no doubt. Knowing that stoked me to new-found reaches of fury. I’d yank back his head by the hair, fleck his skin with spittle, worry my teeth at his throat, wonder idly what it might take to have him remember me. The front of his thighs banging against the desk, hard enough to leave bruises. My teethmarks on his shoulder. I’d scrawl my signature across his skin and see whether he’d have the wit to puzzle me out. In that, too, he never failed to disappoint me.

There’s others like him. Dear old Henry ain’t the only hypocrite in London. They’re easy to spot – they’re the ones that shudder and blench at the sight of me, press their handkerchiefs to their mouths and look away, thinking I don’t know why they can’t bring themselves to look me in the eye. I’m a looking glass, held up not to them but to their secret selves, and when they get a sniff of me it sets them howling for their freedom.

I’m the bit of themselves they want to pretend don’t exist, and if I get too close I’ll drag them back down into the reeking filth where they belong. Same as him, my brother, my beloved. Spit and you’ll hit one, like him whose skull I bashed in and god what a joy that was and how Henry did exult in it. When he broke through the shell of his egg at breakfast time, the feel of it splintering beneath the bowl of his spoon had him hard as iron beneath the dining table. He’d have you think it was horror that shook him but he’d be lying. It was Henry who taught me everything I know. It was Henry who made me what I am.

So I’ll leave you with this, good sirs: an adieu and a promise to all the fine gentlemen, and most especially to them as they keep in darkness and in chains:--

You’ll be hearing from me soon.


End file.
